The commissioner of baseball looked like thunder: ”This will never happen again,” he said. ”One more misstep for a battered sport,” intoned The New York Times. ”Baseball is the Titanic,” said one of their columnists. ”One of the most embarrassing nights baseball has endured,” wailed USA Today.
Excuse me? Is there something wrong? Has someone died? (Actually, someone has just died, but that’s not what they were wailing about.)
No, the tragedy was that most un-American of sporting moments: they held a baseball game, and nobody won.
The occasion was the All-Star game, the Midsummer Classic: the midway point of the season when the best players of the two rival leagues, the American and the National, compete against each other, with honour rather than profit the overriding motive.
In baseball, the concept of a draw or tie does not exist. If it rains, the result stands or the game is replayed, depending on how far it has progressed. If the scores are level after the allotted nine innings, they go on — and on, if necessary.
This is what started to happen in Milwaukee last week. But there was a problem. Baseball players can be substituted almost ad infinitum but once someone has left the game, he can never rejoin it. For the All-Star game, the convention is that no one stays on too long so that the highly paid stars don’t get too knackered playing an exhibition, and so the fans can see them all.
In the 11th inning, the two managers went to tell the commissioner, Bud Selig, they had run out of bodies: although there were 30 players in each squad, there was no one left on the bench. They did not want to annoy rival managers by over-using their precious assets: most relevantly, their fragile-armed pitchers.
Selig shrugged theatrically, then announced that if the National League failed to score the winning run before the inning ended, the game would be declared a tie. And so it was: 7-7. In cricket, it would be called a classic. In Milwaukee, the fans pelted the field with debris.
Selig was the sickest man of all. This is his home town. He owns the local team, the Milwaukee Brewers (though his shares are in trust while he runs the sport). He had been planning this night for years, and it could be 2032 before the occasion comes back to the city.
Assuming, that is, the game still exists. This is a sad time for the sport though, to an outsider, a tied game would seem like the least of its problems. The sport’s ever-tetchy industrial relations are at breaking point again and it is quite likely that, as in 1994, the World Series will be cancelled because of a players’ strike. The game’s followers resent the greedy stars and the greedy owners about equally.
If the season does go the distance, it is possible that someone will smash the home run record, reset in 2001 at 73 by Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, for the third time in five years. However, the recent surge in hitting has suddenly been called into question by very credible allegations of widespread steroid use, a subject on which baseball has been as dozy as cricket was about bribes.
Attendances are spiralling downwards — Milwaukee, the worst team in baseball, are suffering the biggest fall of all, which is another embarrassment for Selig. He claimed this week that one club was so broke it might be unable to pay its staff next week and that another might go under by the end of the season. No one believed him, though, and he quickly back-pedalled.
What’s beyond doubt is that the National Pastime is looking undignified, which brings us back to the dead man. Ted Williams, the Boston Red Sox’s and, according to most judges, the sport’s greatest ever hitter, died a week ago aged 83. He wanted to be cremated with his ashes spread over the Florida Keys.
He has ended up with his body frozen in an Arizona laboratory, apparently because his son thinks he can sell the great man’s DNA. That’s real indignity.
There are worse things than tying.